A bit of background. My parents live in a street where they can only get ADSL, and Fibre is more than 18 months away. Their ADSL connection is horrible - they only get about 4Mbps down and 0.6Mbps up. I know they can do better because some of their neighbours are connecting at 11 or 12. BarTender kindly tested their line for me a while back and confirmed that they clearly need a master splitter to bypass their original 1970's house wiring in order to get improved speeds. At the time they weren't sure that the potential improvements justified the expense.

Anyway, following the recent update to the 998 bandplan, which increased the amount of noise you can have on your phone line to be eligible for VDSL, the Spark website was updated to say that VDSL was now available at their property. Since the install is free on a 12-month plan and includes a master splitter, I thought it would be win/win to order VDSL, get the splitter put in, and get potentially much better speed for a small increase in their monthly charge. Even a modest VDSL speed of 18 or 20Mbps would be a huge improvement for them. Their need for better speeds has recently increased since my Dad just bought himself a flash new Freeview Plus TV with Netflix, and now finds their current connection is too slow to watch good hi-def content online (I know, he should have checked that first!). 

So last night I helped him put in an order on the Spark site for VDSL. All good... until today when the Spark copper team emailed him to advise that VDSL isn't available at their address. Say what? I spoke to Spark via chat a few weeks ago and they confirmed their attenuation was around 13-16 db, which should be just within the new VDSL tolerance. So is the problem that the copper team are still judging VDSL availability based on the old 10 db tolerance, or are my parents truly too far away from a cabinet to get it, in which case why is Spark's site telling them they can?

I'd appreciate suggestions of what to do next. Is there a particular department I can escalate to? Is there any kindly Spark person on here that could confirm for sure whether they are eligible or not? I'd be super grateful.